Blogging Tools: Apps to Better Manage Your Blog

Do you have a blog?

Want to improve the content development, publishing and promotion processes?

To discover how to streamline your blogging with the best tools, I interview Ian Cleary.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Ian Cleary, the social tools guy. His blog, RazorSocial.com has placed in our Top 10 Social Media Blogs 3 years in a row. He's also the founder of the Digital Influencer Club.

Ian will explore marketing tools for bloggers.

You'll discover tools for your editorial calendar, search engine optimization, social media, email marketing and more.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Blogging Tools
How Ian got into blogging

Ian talks about the social media training company he had in Ireland. He says his blog failed because he wasn't particularly passionate about it; he was blogging because people said he should. Ian thinks that's the trap a lot of people fall into.

Ian shares how reading Launch helped him realize what he'd done wrong with his blog, so he decided to focus on the tools and tech side of social media.

Listen to the show to hear about Ian's first encounter with Mike.

Editorial tools and plugins

Ian says it doesn't matter if you have a team of one or ten, you still need to plan your blogging.

He explains how he and his team use the Status feature of a WordPress plugin called Edit Flow to move posts from Ian to his image person, and then to the editor. Once the editor is finished, the post is ready to publish.

Ian also keeps rough ideas for future blog posts in EditFlow under the Pitch status, so he has post ideas ready to write anytime he goes to the blog.

CoSchedule is another excellent calendar tool Ian is excited to try.

Regardless of the tool you choose, you need a good editorial process, Ian says, even if you use Microsoft Excel to track things in the short-term.

Listen to the show to discover some of the limitations of Edit Flow.

SEO and research tools

Even if you don't know a lot about SEO, Ian explains how the Yoast SEO plugin helps you optimize your content for search in an easy way.

If you're creating a piece of content and want to see if there's a way to improve it, Ian suggests using BuzzSumo or Uprise. Both are research tools that let you view lists of content from across the web based on a keyword you search for. The lists show which posts received the most shares, and Ian tell listeners how to review them to make their own content better.

Ian explains the process of using Ahrefs to find links to high-ranking articles that are similar to yours but are out of date. He shares how bloggers can reach out to these authors or websites to link to their newly published content instead.

Ian also mentions a predictive content analytics tool called InboundWriter. The tool lets you put in the keywords you want to rank for, then gives you a green or a red status to show your chance of getting organic traffic to your content based on those keywords.

Finally, Ian shares how bloggers can use SEMrush to see which keywords their competitors rank for in Google search results. He says that when you see what words your competitors are ranking for, you can pull traffic from them by writing better articles based on those keywords.

Listen to the show to hear more about InboundWriter.

Social promotion tools

When you include influential people who are relevant to your niche in your content, there's a good chance they will share that content, which will drive shares and traffic.

Ian says Topsy is a great way to find relevant,